American Womens History

Julia Ward (1819-1910) was an heiress and aspiring poet when she married Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens to John Brown. But Samuel also wasted Julia's inheritance, isolated and discouraged her, and opposed her literary ambitions. Julia persisted and continued to publish poems and plays while raising six children.

Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century.

With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance.

Nineteenth-century America was rife with Protestant-fueled anti-Catholicism. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez reveals how Protestants nevertheless became surprisingly and deeply fascinated with the Virgin Mary, even as her role as a devotional figure who united Catholics grew. Documenting the vivid Marian imagery that suffused popular visual and literary culture, Alvarez argues that Mary became a potent shared exemplar of Christian womanhood around which Christians of all stripes rallied.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes the fascinating story of America’s national day of thanks and of the tenacious and inspiring Sarah Josepha Hale, a 19th-century woman who made establishing this holiday her life’s mission - one brought to fruition by the wise support of Abraham Lincoln.

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

Louisa on the Frontlines is the first narrative nonfiction book focusing on Louisa May Alcott's career as a nurse during the Civil War. Though her service was brief, the dramatic experience was one that she considered pivotal in helping her write the classic Little Women....

A fascinating chronicle of radical feminism’s rise and fall from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Daring to Be Bad is a must-listen for both students of gender history and activists of intersectionality. This 30th anniversary edition reveals how current debates about race, transgender rights, queer theory, and sexuality echo issues that galvanized and divided feminists 50 years ago.

When American Claire Craig Evans married a charming British man, there was a cost for the snappy banter and countless offers of tea: she had to uproot life as she knew it and relocate to the UK. Who wouldn’t want to move to an enchanted island where mysterious women with dewy complexions made jam in thatched cottages with millennia-old lichen attached?

The story of the American Civil War is not complete without examining the extraordinary and influential lives of Jessie Frémont, Nelly McClellan, Ellen Sherman, and Julia Grant, the wives of Abraham Lincoln's top generals. They were their husbands' closest confidantes and had a profound impact on the generals' ambitions and actions. Most important, the women's own attitudes toward and relationships with Lincoln had major historical significance.

Running from Bondage, Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America, explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role.

For the Many presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of 20th-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made slavery illegal in the territory that would later become Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. However, many Black individuals’ rights were denied by white enslavers who continued to hold them captive in the territory well into the 19th century. Set in this period of American history, Enslaved, Indentured, Free shines a light on five extraordinary Black women—Marianne, Mariah, Patsey, Rachel, and Courtney—whose lives intersected in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

After November 8, 2016, first came the sadness; then came the rage, the activism, and the protests; and, finally, for thousands of women, the next step was to run for office - many of them for the first time. Journalist Caitlin Moscatello reported on this wave of female candidates for New York magazine’s The Cut, Glamour, and Elle. And in See Jane Win, she further documents this pivotal time in women’s history.

In this sweeping history, author Johanna Neuman demonstrates that American women defeated the male patriarchy only after they convinced men that it was in their interests to share political power.

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders.

For centuries, women who emerge as mystic leaders have played vital roles in American culture. For just as long, they've been subjugated and ridiculed. Today, women and others across the nation are once again turning to their mystic powers to #HexThePatriarchy and help fight the forces that seem bent on relegating them to second-class citizenry.

After the United Nations established International Women's Year (IWY) in 1975, Congress mandated and funded state conferences to elect delegates to attend the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977. At that conference, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists adopted a National Plan of Action, endorsing the hot-button issues of abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and gay rights - then a new issue in national politics.

Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration - a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South.